The Nargun and the Stars - 2009 - Perth International Arts Festival

Company Biography:
ERTH-Visual & Physical Inc
ERTH brings the impossible to life. ERTH is dedicated to creating original new
Australian visual performance works, providing audiences with eye-popping
visual experiences. Giant puppetry, stilt-walkers, inflatable environments and
aerial and flying creatures – ERTH is all these things and more.
Founded in 1990 in Ballarat, Victoria, and now housed in Sydney’s newest
contemporary arts complex, Carriageworks, the Company builds its own
repertoire while also generating work for other resident performance
companies and commissions for external organisations.
Their work spans from roving-style street theatre to larger scale, site-specific
productions and theatre shows. These include Incubator, Gargoyles,
Waterheads, Caution, Bushfire, The Garden and most recently Gondwana and
The Petting Zoo.
Their new work is an adaptation of Patricia Wrightson’s classic novel The
Nargun and the Stars, written by Verity Laughton and co-directed by acclaimed
Indigenous director Wesley Enoch. Nargun was commissioned by Sydney
Festival and Perth International Arts Festival and premiered at the Sydney
Festival in January 2009.
ERTH has built a national and international reputation for its work, regularly
touring to major Australian and international festivals. These have included
the Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide festivals, Hong Kong Fringe, Galway Arts
Festival, Stockton Riverside Festival in the UK, Singapore Arts Festival and the
Festival of Arts and Ideas in Connecticut, USA. ERTH undertakes community
workshops, cultural development projects and mentorships and its workshop
studio custom-builds for many clients. Past clients include the Sydney Opera
House, Sydney Olympic Organising Committee, Centenary of Federation and
Opera Australia.
Increasingly ERTH is bridging the gap between cultural and theatrical
institutions by bringing physical theatre and puppetry to museum
environments. Successful roving and aerial performances at Melbourne
Museum, Old Parliament House in Canberra and Auckland Museum have led
to commissioned design, construction and performance programs that span
several years each. This list also includes Powerhouse Museum and Australian
Museum in Sydney and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, California.
A small core team of artists manage dozens of freelancers. They come
from diverse disciplines such as sculpture, painting, costume design and
mechanical engineering and the performance arts of musical, physical, circus
and aerial theatre. ERTH provides valuable development opportunities for
established and emerging artists.
ERTH is a non-profit organisation – an association incorporated in NSW – and
receives project funding from Arts NSW and the Australia Council for the Arts.
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Scott Wright
CO-DIRECTOR / MANAGER
Sharon Kerr
CO-DIRECTOR / DESIGN COORDINATOR Steve Howarth
MUSICAL DIRECTOR
Phil Downing
artist Biographies
Patricia Wrightson
AUTHOR
Patricia Wrightson has written more than 15 books for children and a novel
for adults and has edited several collections of stories for children. She uses
Aboriginal folk-spirits to enrich her children’s fiction, which she categorises
as contemporary Australian fantasy. She believes that fantasy can be used as
a means of exploring the ‘other’ point of view, which, in turn, she hopes will
stretch the reader’s understanding and facilitate independent thinking.
Patricia Wrightson has received many honours and awards for her fiction over
four decades, including the Australian Children’s Book Council Book of the Year
Award for The Crooked Snake, The Nargun and the Stars, The Ice is Coming
and A Little Fear, which also won the Boston Globe Horn Book Award. She was
awarded the Dromkeen Children’s Literature Foundation Medal in 1984 for
overall excellence in her field. In 1986 she became the only Australian writer
to win the Hans Christian Andersen Medal.
Verity Laughton
WRITER
Verity Laughton writes for most forms of theatre.
Her work includes main-stage adult drama,
a promenade community event, a musical,
adaptations, plays for child and family audiences,
work for dance, puppets and theatre of image
and a ‘neutral script’. Her plays include The
Lightkeeper (AWGIE for Community Theatre, 2004)
(Mainstreet Theatre and national tour), The Snow
Queen (Windmill Performing Arts), Burning (Griffin Prize, 2001), Carrying Light
(STSA and Vitalstatistix) and The Mourning After (three productions: Playbox
Theatre Company and national tour, Riverina Theatre Company and Interplay
Productions, NZ). Verity’s radio play Fox, created for ABC Radio National, won
the 2004 AWGIE for Best Radio Play. Recent work includes Gondwana for
ERTH-Visual & Physical and Davy and Moon Door for ABC Audio Arts. Sweet
Thing, her latest play for adults, was shortlisted for the Griffin Award, Croydon
Warehouse Theatre (London) International Playwriting Award and the Rodney
Seaborn Prize. She is a member of the 7-ON group of playwrights, with whom
she is writing a stage adaptation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Scott Wright
CO-DIRECTOR
Scott Wright is the Artistic Director and co-founder
of ERTH-Visual & Physical Inc and trained as a
dancer and choreographer in Victoria for three
years prior. He is a multi-skilled artist incorporating
puppetry (one of his greatest loves), movement,
acting, aerial, stilts and pyrotechnics. He has
directed most of ERTH’s successful touring shows,
including Gargoyles, Garden, Bushfire, the
infamous Waterheads and the epic Gondwana.
Scott has worked with a large variety of professional companies and
institutions, individual artists and community groups both nationally and
internationally. Over the years he has been a mentor to numerous young
emerging artists throughout the country and has freelanced as a director and
performer to broaden his experience and enhance his professional credentials.
Personal highlights include a sell-out season with 42nd Street on Broadway,
acting as a research and development consultant for the Sydney Olympics,
performing for the Japanese royal family and recently directing a show with
over 200 community participants in which an aria was performed by six hotrod
cars and three opera singers.
Wesley Enoch
CO-DIRECTOR
Wesley Enoch is the eldest son of Doug and
Lyn Enoch, who hail from Stradbroke Island in
Queensland. He is Nuccual Nuugi.
Wesley has written and directed extensively for
the stage, working with most of Australia’s state
theatre companies and major festivals. He has
been artistic director of Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous
Performing Arts and Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Theatre, an associate artist with the Queensland Theatre
Company, resident director at the Sydney Theatre Company and director of
the Indigenous section of the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth
Games. He is currently an associate artist at Company B and a trustee of the
Sydney Opera House.
In 2008 he was the artistic director of Australia’s delegation to the Festival
of Pacific Arts in American Samoa and directed Dallas Winmar’s Yibiyung for
Company B Belvoir. In 2007 his The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table was
directed by Marion Potts for the Griffin Theatre Company, having won the 2005
Patrick White Playwright’s Award.
In 2003 Wesley directed Eora Crossing, a spectacular outdoor event for Legs
on the Wall, Museum of Sydney and the Sydney Festival. He directed Riverland
in 2004 for Windmill Performing Arts and the Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane
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